Rugged Box-Level Systems by: Jeff Child
Within the last two years the .concept of “Stand-Alone Rugged Boxes” has become a fixture in this market. The trend has now broadened out to include a larger con¬tingent of smaller form factor board vendors. The term stand¬alone rugged boxes applies to complete system boxes—which often support standard form factor boards inside them. These systems provide a complete, tested and enclosed computing so¬lution that eliminates complex integration chores for military customers. This idea has been gathering momentum in the past couple years whereby traditional embedded board vendors are adding stand-alone rugged box-level systems to their military market offerings.
As the product roundup in this section shows, at present, there arc more than a dozen vendors that have some sort of stand-alone rugged box-level system in their offerings—many even have whole product lines in that category. As a product cat¬egory, stand-alone rugged boxes are somewhat difficult to define because they’re available in a variety of shapes, sizes and capabil¬ities. They typically comprise a set of modular embedded boards housed in a rugged enclosure that has its own power supply and interface ports to link to a variety of user terminals.
Often the boards in the box are standards-based cards such as PC/104, PMC and 3U CompactPCI. But the enclosures by and large aren’t in any industry standard footprint, although that may change as standards like MicroTCA and some box-level VITA standards gain acceptance in the military realm. Recently a number of vendors from the PC/104 community have joined the stand-alone rugged box trend. This stacked multi-board PC/104 architecture provides for a shock- and vibration-resis¬tant off-the-shelf computing solution by eliminating backplanes and metal card cages, making PC/104 ideal for military vehicles such as tanks or even Humvees.
Earlier this month—on Election Day in fact—this topic of complete integrated systems was discussed at a luncheon panel session at RTC Group’s Real-Time Embedded Com¬puting Conference (RTECC) in Reston, VA. The panel discussed how stand-alone rugged box solutions have emerged as a second center of gravity alongside SBCs. Board-level systems, according to the panel, remain tremendously important—and active— especially in the areas of tech upgrades and tech refresh where board-level products shine. But some new military programs are opting for complete box-level systems—and some older pro¬grams are shifting from a slot-card scheme to a box-level imple¬mentation. The panel also discussed the technology forces that have brought this trend toward integrated system solutions into the forefront—such as FPGAs and the emergence of multi-func¬tion boards. Also analyzed by the panel was the issue of how mergers and acquisitions in the embedded computing industry pushed forward this trend toward integrated solutions. COTS Journal Online – John Sayer – Xembedded
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